Homelab Kubernetes Setup

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a hyperscale data center that I can just play around with. Well, I guess technically if I had unlimited funding, AWS kind of fits that description. Okay, let me revise, I don’t have a hyperscale data center that I’m willing to pay to play around with indefinitely.

That’s why I really enjoyed seeing this piece by Justin Warren. I always though playing around with containers was limited to installing Docker on my Mac to run Lynx. To be clear, this is still the best use of containers. But Justin goes a step beyond a simple Docker install though. He’s digging into getting Kubernetes setup on a relatively modest setup, three Scale Computing HC1000 nodes. If I were doing this, if I got it even close to running, I’d be happy. But Justin is doing this to better understand why design choices are made in the data center. The benefit of his smaller layout is he can be much more flexible, to replicate what might be seen at scale.

This piece runs through the setup of the physical hardware. He’s got another about getting the boot sequence up, and it’ll be fascinating to follow how this project progresses. I haven’t seen a lot of posts exploring the setup of a container orchestration and management. I’ll definitely be following the series to learn more.

eigenmagic comments:

In setting up my Kubernetes from Scratch environment, I wanted to get as close to the physical gear as I can so I can understand what’s really going on. As we discussed earlier, assuming a cloud service already exists makes the initial setup much easier, but that assumes an awful lot about how the infrastructure actually functions.

My goal is to learn, not merely to get things running, because I want to understand why certain choices are better than others. Learning involves trying things and making mistakes, so that’s part of my aim here.

A great online guide for starting off with Kubernetes is the Creating a Custom Cluster From Scratch guide. It took me a while to read a bunch of different guides to Kubernetes before settling on this one as a good starting point for what we want to do.

About Rich Stroffolino

Rich has been a tech enthusiast since he first used the speech simulator on a Magnavox Odyssey². Current areas of interest include ZFS, the false hopes of memristors, and the oral history of Transmeta.